Reading Mediated Identities: Auto/biographical Agency in the Material Book, Museum Space, Social Media Platforms, and Archives

dc.contributor.advisor Howes, Craig
dc.contributor.author Carlson, Amy J.
dc.contributor.department English
dc.date.accessioned 2020-02-20T18:10:39Z
dc.date.available 2020-02-20T18:10:39Z
dc.date.issued 2019
dc.description.degree Ph.D.
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10125/66257
dc.subject Literature
dc.subject Information technology
dc.subject Mass communication
dc.subject Auto/biography
dc.subject Material culture
dc.subject Mediation
dc.subject memory
dc.subject Social media
dc.title Reading Mediated Identities: Auto/biographical Agency in the Material Book, Museum Space, Social Media Platforms, and Archives
dc.type Thesis
dcterms.abstract This study considers the invisible or often ignored mediations operating on life narratives to reveal the ever-changing strategies authors, artists, and even corporate social media platforms adopt to shape, control, or resist the auto/biographical in these texts. Adopting Sarah Kember’s and Joanna Zylinska’s focus on the flow of mediation and following their suggestion to “cut” the flow in order to understand our selves within it, I concentrate on mediations operating in several spaces where we find auto/biographical texts: the material book, the museum gallery and its associated online counterparts, social media platforms, and archives. Texts include art works by Karen Hampton and Kara Walker; Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer's Through the Looking Glass; April Drexel’s installation Kūpaʻa; Shapira Shahak’s website Yolocaust; and Sydney Iaukea’s The Queen and I: A Story of Dispossessions and Reconnections in Hawaiʻi. In the process, I address a number of questions. As a text moves through different media or spreads through social networks, what agents act upon it? What do the text, the creator, and the audience gain, and what do they lose? How do constantly evolving technologies shape or stymie the auto/biographical “I”? As many of these texts testify to lives in specific times and places, how do the mediations affect larger issues of social and collective memory? Studying these mediations should therefore be a fundamental part of any reading of how we construct our identities and tell the stories of our lives.
dcterms.extent 264 pages
dcterms.language eng
dcterms.publisher University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
dcterms.rights All UHM dissertations and theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission from the copyright owner.
dcterms.type Text
local.identifier.alturi http://dissertations.umi.com/hawii:10440
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